This setup is used to test and run playbooks locally on a virtual machine set up with vagrant.

Prerequisites

• VirtualBox
• Vagrant
• ansible

Installation Guide

• OSX
• Windows
• Linux

Installing on OSX

1. Install VirtualBox

$ brew cask install virtualbox

Notice: if you get an error while installing you need to accept Allow in System Preferences > Security & Privacy > General. You can also install VirtualBox manually from https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads. More infos: https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/301305.

2. Install vagrant

$ brew cask install vagrant

3. Run vagrant

$ vagrant up

4. After the vm is successfully up and running, you can create a snapshot. Snapshot comes in handy, if you wish to run mulitple tests, one after another, on a clean installed machine.

$ vagrant snapshot push

restore the snapshot

$ vagrant snapshot pop

Run playbooks

To run the playbook from your machine, you can such execute a command as an example command below.

$ ansible-playbook -v --vault-password-file ~/.ssh/vault_password_file -i inventories/local/hosts --limit "myhosts" play-mystack.yaml

Explanation:

• -v - display verbose output
• --vault-password-file - file with password, used to decrypt encrypted vault sensitive data (you need to have vault_password_file on your local machine under ~/.ssh folder)
• -i - path to the inventories, for testing purpose we use inventories/local/hosts
• --limit - used to limit to which hosts the playbook will be applied

Important: You need ansible.pem private key and config file under ~/.ssh folder. config should contain

Host 127.0.0.1
    User ubuntu
    IdentityFile ~/.ssh/ansible.pem

Updating Vagrantfile

If you updated Vagrantfile and want to apply changes execute

$ vagrant reload

Checking changes on vm locally

If you want to see, if changes were applied to the local vm machine or you want to prove, that everything went well, you can ssh to the vm with

$ ssh -v -i ~/.ssh/ansible.pem [email protected] -p 2222